Abstract

The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization is the first academic study, based upon multi-archival research, to challenge the standard narrative of interwar history. It re-opens fundamental debates on the role of economics, political ideologies and racism in shaping the course of events that led from one World War to the next, and explains, for the first time, why the world economic and political systems simultaneously broke down between the wars. Explaining the direction of the causal relationship within this dual crisis, the book yields a new understanding of these events and their relativity to our present globalized world. The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization raises profound questions abut the responsibility of Britain, the United States and the agents of international commerce and finance for the breakdown of the Versilles settlement after the First World War, the collapse of globalization, and events leading to the Second World War.